jonathanmoeller (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} jonathanmoeller) wrote,@ 2007-12-17 11:33:00 |
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meditations on Macintosh, part II
Friends and neighbors, you might recall that last week I expressed the opinion that everything good about the Macintosh and OS X comes from the fact that it is based upon UNIX, while everything bad about the Macintosh derives from its manufacturer, Apple. Further events this week have only verified this opinion.
I needed to destroy all data on a hard drive. There are many time-honored and effective ways to do this; drills, blowtorches, blast furnaces, and so forth. My particular favorite method involves a standard carpenter's claw hammer. Simply pry open the hard drive, take careful aim at the platters, and pound away (after taking suitable precautions to shield your eyes from flying debris, of course; some of those newer drive platters shatter in spectacular fashion).
But alas, in this case the hard drive had to remain in one piece. Warranty, you understand.
Fortunately, Mac OS X's Disk Utility application includes the ability to do secure multiple-pass wipes of a hard drive. So I plugged the hard drive into the Mac via my handy-dandy SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 adapter, fired up Disk Utility, and rigged it for Secure Erasure. I promptly received an error message that Finder could not unmount the 'Untitled' volume, since it was in use, and therefore Secure Erasure could not take place.
Heck with this! So I promptly turned to the Terminal, and invoked the following UNIX command:
diskutil eject Untitled
The volume unmounted, Secure Erasure commenced, and once again the Command Line has proven its supremacy.
-JM
Friends and neighbors, you might recall that last week I expressed the opinion that everything good about the Macintosh and OS X comes from the fact that it is based upon UNIX, while everything bad about the Macintosh derives from its manufacturer, Apple. Further events this week have only verified this opinion.
I needed to destroy all data on a hard drive. There are many time-honored and effective ways to do this; drills, blowtorches, blast furnaces, and so forth. My particular favorite method involves a standard carpenter's claw hammer. Simply pry open the hard drive, take careful aim at the platters, and pound away (after taking suitable precautions to shield your eyes from flying debris, of course; some of those newer drive platters shatter in spectacular fashion).
But alas, in this case the hard drive had to remain in one piece. Warranty, you understand.
Fortunately, Mac OS X's Disk Utility application includes the ability to do secure multiple-pass wipes of a hard drive. So I plugged the hard drive into the Mac via my handy-dandy SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 adapter, fired up Disk Utility, and rigged it for Secure Erasure. I promptly received an error message that Finder could not unmount the 'Untitled' volume, since it was in use, and therefore Secure Erasure could not take place.
Heck with this! So I promptly turned to the Terminal, and invoked the following UNIX command:
diskutil eject Untitled
The volume unmounted, Secure Erasure commenced, and once again the Command Line has proven its supremacy.
-JM
